


The Purge, Season 2, Episode 1, This Is Not a Test

by TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer



Category: The Purge (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Episode Review, Episode: s02e01 This Is Not a Test, Meta, Nonfiction, Season Premiere, Season/Series 02, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 04:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21093377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer/pseuds/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer
Summary: Warning: Contains spoilers for the episode and other parts of the series. Complete.





	The Purge, Season 2, Episode 1, This Is Not a Test

It seems the second season is going to be even more into world-building than the first. As much as I’ll miss watching Lee Tergesen, I’m excited about this.

Open to an actress coming out onto a lit stage, and out of the men sitting in the audience area, one of them takes the role of dealing with her. I say this because, though I don’t find her annoying, it seems most of them silently do. He brings up an insurance commercial she did, patiently lays out the character’s motivation when she asks about it, and when she’s all, ‘I was thinking my character should wear these glasses I brought,’ he’s like, ‘Yeah, sure, go for it.’

She reads the Purge warning announcement, and she does really good with it. However, due to my issues with recognising voices, I can’t say whether her voice is what’s used/has been used before or not.

When she gets to the part about murder being legal, she expresses hesitation about her/her character telling people to murder, but the handler calmly reframes things: She’s simply informing everyone what the rules are.

After she’s done, she asks if this is for a movie. Heh.

Less funny is: Best case scenario is she doesn’t die soon after this, but since it’s unlikely the Purge starts happening in the distant future, she’s going to have to deal with the horror of being/almost being a big player.

After this, at the NFFA Surveillance Center, some people are sitting/sleeping in pods. They’re told it’s time for their shifts.

It’s two hours until the Purge is over, and everyone is watching as horrible chaos reigns. Esme Carmona realises a man is toting around a bomb, and using facial recognition, she tags him as committing a major felony. She informs Newbie Girl, Vivian Ross, he will soon be dead, and Vivian wonders why, with all the leeway he has, he’d still decide to take his chance with a class-5 weapon.

Question: Since it’s shown she used remote X-Ray to see the bomb in his bag, it’s possible to X-Ray past masks to be able to apply facial recognition to faces?

Esme sees a bank robbery on the screen, and this transitions over to said robbery. There’s grizzly guy Ryan Grant, a man who annoys everyone named Tommy Ortiz, a woman named Sara Williams, and Doug Vargas, a black man waiting in the car.

Any chance the vehicle is a Pontiac?

The two men are beating up security guards, Sara is working on opening the vault, and the three inside have on glasses with lights that make it where Esme can’t see their faces. This technology is illegal except for on Purge night.

Tommy uses Grizzly Ryan’s name when talking to the robbers, and even with the fact what they’re doing is currently legal, it doesn’t strike me as a good idea to let someone who you’ve beaten and tied up know anything personal about you, including a first name.

But then, Grizzly Ryan has no problem addressing all three of them by their names within the guards’ earshot.

Since I’ve never robbed a bank, I’m willing to admit that I might not have the greatest grasp of what the biggest no’s are and aren’t.

Back at surveillance headquarters, Vivian is being all newbie, and Esme is being all I’ve done this job a million years.

Over in a big smart house, a black couple with the annoying alliterative names of Marcus and Michelle Moore is in bed. Marcus is staring at a gun on the nightstand. They talk some, it’s implied he hasn’t always been in such a high social class, and there’s macking.

Going back to surveillance headquarters, a man throws up, and no one is overtly mean, but clearly, there isn’t much sympathy. Esme gives Vivian something to put under her nose.

Elsewhere, two idiot frat boys have decided they need to get a picture of a suicide bridge tonight, because, in media, frat boys are all stupid and many are evil.

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually met a frat boy in real life, but these two aren’t doing anything to change said representation.

There’s a brief bank scene, and then, back at the smart house, Marcus wakes up to find himself all alone in bed, and then, the smart house starts un-arming. Taking the gun, he eventually finds Michelle in the kitchen clutching a knife on the floor.

They manage to get the bedroom, but he’s been shot.

I suspect Michelle is in on this, but I could be wrong.

In the bank, they get into the vault.

Over to the smart house, he decides to lure the guy out, and once he does, she’ll re-arm the house.

He can’t know there’s only one guy, and so, this plan isn’t good. Assuming she isn’t in on this, he could be luring one guy out and having her trap herself with one or more others.

However, he and an intruder leave, and she re-arms the house.

In the bank, Tommy is uneasy about the fact so many of the bills seem to be $1, but Grizzly Ryan insists they do the counting later.

Tommy might be onto something. What, if shortly before Purge night, in anticipation of possibly being robbed, the bank removed most of the big bills and left smaller ones?

Meanwhile, Marcus is running around in the wild of the suburbs with unseen people trying to kill him.

Over at headquarters, Esme tells Vivian, if it weren’t for Purge, people would be doing all this horrible stuff year-round. Then, however, Esme realises a loved one of hers, a woman named Professor Adams, is out in the streets on Purge night, and she silently freaks the frell out.

The idiot frat boys show up at the bridge, and one of them is an absolute a-hole when he compares one of the hanging people to the other guy’s girlfriend. I actually wouldn’t have blamed the other one if he’d hauled off and punched the a-hole for this statement.

Back to Marcus, he manages to get into a car without being detected. It won’t start, but he gets in the backseat.

At the bank, the guards have been killed by other thieves who want to steal from Grizzly Ryan’s crew, and GR’s Crew all manage to get locked behind bullet-resistant glass.

It’s now 36 minutes ‘til the end.

Esme is still tracking her loved one, and Vivian is trying to distract her.

Elsewhere, the frat boys come across a tied up, screaming woman. The lesser a-hole of the two tries to help her, and this doesn’t end well. He gets locked in with a crazy masked man, and the a-hole bounces. The masked man kills the woman before menacingly approaching the frat boy.

Back at headquarters, Esme watches as her loved one is killed. The people doing this either demand a vial or a file from the professor, but I’m not sure which.

Meanwhile, Marcus manages to get the intruder killed.

At the bank, Doug is taken hostage.

Over to headquarters, Vivian tries to talk Emse around to being strictly professional, and making a show of agreeing, Esme nevertheless starts secretly transferring the footage to a personal flash-drive.

Meanwhile, the masked guy tries to rape the frat boy, but grabbing the knife stuck in the dead woman, the frat boy kills him.

At the bank, GR’s crew escapes, but Tommy insists on going back for a bag of money despite the sirens signalling the end blaring.

Esme realises that Tommy had one foot on the bank’s door line just after the siren ended.

Really?

I know they robbed a bank, but just barely touching private property can be realistically used to charge someone with a major felony?

Also, is there a legal distinction between minor and major felonies in current day America? Personally, I’m for the legalisation/decriminalisation of drugs, and I really don’t think someone who, for example, non-violently stole a car should be chucked into a supermax with serial killers, but I’ve always gotten the impression America’s legal system basically treats all felonies and felons the same.

Anywho, I don’t think GR’s crew realises that all this just happened, but they are done with Tommy.

Marcus makes it home.

Frat boy removes the would-be rapist’s mask before getting the key to free himself.

There’s a brief montage of all of them, and during it, Esme retrieves her flash-drive. However, it’s shown that headquarters has security cameras.

I wonder if a certain real-life former alphabet agency contractor is part of The Purge universe history. I’m pretty sure, in real-life, after 2013, someone high-up said something to the effect, ‘So, we have rules against bringing a kid’s toy around, but no one was freaking watching the people privy to information that could be sold for billions of dollars to foreign entities and/or used as proof that we’ve been doing things the vast majority of our own country wouldn’t like?’

Of course, even knowing certain things in the movie about said former contractor was outright made up, I’m kind of wondering if there was some kind of subtextual layer to that scene where a guard playing with a Rubix cube was part of the plan to smuggle information out succeeding.

Back to the show, Marcus discovers the intruder was stalking him.

I still suspect Michelle.

Fin.


End file.
